The Denver Post and Grand Junction Sentinel have endorsed Michael Bennet because they like him better than they like Ken Buck, not because they agree with appointed Obama Democrat Bennet's reckless and pandering votes for Obama's spending and taxing agendas. The Post's endorsement of Bennet hinges on the fact that "we know him," and damns him with little or no faint praise. Get this:

We've long admired him for his smarts, his independence and his coalition-building when he was Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper's chief of staff and the Denver Public Schools superintendent. But that Michael Bennet has been mostly AWOL since he was appointed senator in January 2009.

From that day, he has been running for election and, at times, running scared. • • •

In 2008, as the economy was sinking into recession, with financial markets frozen and the country lurching in the wrong direction, Coloradans helped sweep President Obama and Democrats to victory.

We endorsed the president and many of those Democrats because we thought the country needed a new direction. But with that newfound control of Washington, Obama and the Democrats overreached. They moved the country to the left, helping to stick future generations with trillions in debt by reckless spending on a stimulus package and other programs, legislating health-care reform that failed to slow the growth in costs, and lavishing billions on corporate bailouts and takeovers.

Sen. Bennet, unfortunately, has helped push that agenda along.

If he had bucked his party and his president on just one major issue, and in turn shown some Colorado independence, it would have been much easier to endorse him. Instead, his 20-month career has been frustrating to watch, leaving voters, and us, with a difficult choice.

The Sentinel pretends to want Bennet because he seems more likely to work with Republicans than Buck is likely to work with Democrats. That's pure bunk. The real reason the Sentinel wants Bennet is because he supports new government subsidies for vehicles that use natural gas, which is produced around Grand Junction. Simply put, the Sentinel's new owner is an Obama Democrat who believes in earmarks and pork. He's putting the natural gas industry's welfare ahead of the economic health of the nation.

In addition to the economic blindness of the editorial boards of the Post and Sentinel, I think that Buck's wrongheaded positions on abortion, personhood, homosexuality and gay marriage cost him any chance he may of had to win the endorsements of these and most other papers in Colorado. He's way more radical on social issues than the women and men on the papers' editorial boards and more intolerant of those who disagree with him on those issues than most Coloradans.

I think Buck scares a lot of independents and moderates in both parties who agree with him on economic and national security issues. He scares me on the social issues.

But Bennet's spend and tax agendas scare me more than Buck's positions on social issues do.

At this point the Senate race is a toss up. It's hard to predict who will win this one on Nov. 2.